critical theory and historical sociology

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Virtual Special Issue: Agnes Heller in Thesis Eleven

It is an honour to be asked to introduce Agnes Heller and her Thesis Eleven essays on this platform, heralded so precisely, and presenced so powerfully by John Rundell’s opening essay. As the Table of Contents suggests, there are many possible ways to read Agnes Heller, to periodise or to thematise her work. Read early, or late, there are serious differences across her trajectory. But there is only one Agnes Heller. Put differently, it is a long way from value to comedy; and yet not. The thematic distinctions suggested here are fruitful: modernity; needs, value, anthropology; home; migrations. How do these papers hang together? Editorially speaking, we at Thesis Eleven likely had a privileged period of access to Agnes’ papers during the time of their Australian exile. We worked as their Englishers, which often gave us first bite on these papers. Agi and Feri had encouraged us to be bold, to go out and ask, and to ask big, and we did, for example with Castoriadis, whose major English language publisher we probably also became after Telos. And so we also became bold with them. I still now remember the enormous pleasure of securing the essay on Home, and much later that of the ‘Three Logics of Modernity’ for our pages and our readers. These are among my Thesis Eleven favourites. The first is conversational, ruminative, suggestive of the intimacies of everyday life, beautifully written, uncluttered, introspective, certainly retrospective. The second is tougher, more forceful, strong yet still somehow suggestive in its purpose, still experimental, firm but contingent, still nagging at questions of modernity which they posited in Theory and Society twenty years earlier. Agnes gave us then, and now, less perhaps the sense that she was prepared to die for any particular position than that she might be prepared to die for the process of consideration and argument. She could talk for hours, and she did. What we were able to publish was just a glimpse of the energy, stamina and curiosity that she was also willing upon us. As Rundell observes, there was always more to the process than Agnes. What is reflected in these essays, by way of defining context, is, I think at least three other presences: Ferenc Fehér; George Markus; and differently, us. Thesis Eleven was not the creature of the Budapest School in exile, yet the influence of Agnes and her friends and immediate colleagues was a necessarily enabling condition of our existence. We are deeply grateful for this opportunity to celebrate her work, and theirs, and our relationship; and we are in debt to our younger generation: Julian Potter, Timothy Andrews and Andrew Gilbert for sponsoring and developing this online voice. In its own way the legacy is passed on.